Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

Sometimes you achieve the best results when you allow yourself to be surprised. Shooting multiple exposures with the technique discussed in this section can cause you to lose some technical control. Don't look at this loss of control as a bad thing though. If you're surprised by the results, perhaps your viewers will be as well. Like Robert Frost once said, "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

To achieve multiple digital exposures in camera, you need to expose for a few seconds on one area and then quickly rotate the camera to another area to expose for a few seconds. Doing so creates one image with two compositions combined. It sounds tricky, but if you use the following guidelines when you create your exposures, you'll be just fine:

Create a situation in which you can have at least a six-second exposure, which is the minimum for creating a digital double exposure.

The longer your shutter is open, the more exposures you can include in your composition.

Use a neutral density filter when creating these long exposures.If you

want to shoot a photo in a situation that doesn't provide a low-light setting (such as at dusk or dawn), a filter can help. A filter that reduces your exposure by at least 10 stops is ideal. This way you can shoot during a bright, sunny day at an aperture setting of f/16 using an ISO of 100 and have an eight-second exposure. (Chapter 3 provides more information on ISO and aperture.)

Plan out your shot.To get multiple images on one digital frame, you have to move your camera during the exposure from one composition to the other. It's important that you know how you need to move the camera to get the shots you want without any excessive movements. Observe your scene and choose a starting point and any other points where you'll be composing. Practice the movements a few times beforehand so you have them down by the time you start shooting.

A tripod helps you move the camera quickly. Moving the camera slowly from one area to the next causes you to have streaks from the transition. To avoid these streaks, plan out the shot before starting the exposure and move quickly between exposures.

Be sure to fix the camera on your exposure's subject for about two seconds.Because you have created a situation where little light is entering your lens, quick movements don't affect your exposure. The camera has to be fixed on something for about two seconds to record anything noticeable. However, keep in mind that anything in motion will be affected with motion blur because you're using a long exposure.

If you want one exposure to be more prevalent than the other, keep the camera pointed in that area for a longer portion of the total exposure than the other. Bright elements show more dominantly over darker elements.

When you think of photography, you probably think about images that are in focus. A blurry photo is considered a failed attempt and is discarded as useless. It doesn't represent the subject in an ideal way. People don't want to look at blurry images; doing so makes them feel like something's wrong with their eyesight. However, a certain quality in a blurry image is worth exploring.

As I discuss experimenting with images that don't have a focal point, I refer to blurry as "soft" because it sounds better and seems appropriate for the mood you create by not having sharp focus. A soft image is subtle and provides a sense of secrecy. The finer details aren't yours to know, so you focus on the other details in the image instead.

When you create a composition with no sharp focus, keep in mind that you'll still have a focal point or a main subject. The subject's story is going to be told through lines, shapes, and colors, but you lose the elements of texture, fine lines, and literal details. Basically you show the subject's essence, so make sure it's interesting. Throwing any old composition out of focus and calling it art usually is a mistake and won't receive positive reviews.

Because you have fewer elements to work with in a soft composition, you have to pay extra careful attention to the ones you do have. Here are the elements to consider:

Lines:Your lines are softened but will still work as leading guides, telling a viewer where to look in the composition. Finer lines may be lost, which simplifies the composition and draws more attention to the bolder lines. Make sure your lines don't take away from your composition in any way.

Shapes:Your shapes contain less detail and become very basic. However, they play a major role in your photo. If the shapes aren't interesting, you have no reason to create this kind of image. Smoother shapes work better in soft compositions than rigid shapes.

" Colors:Colors work as the strongest element in soft compositions. Because color appeals to people, it's used in abstract art, interior design, and fashion to create compositions. If you can create an interesting composition of color, you don't need sharp focus to tell a story.

Reinforce your subject as the focal point in a soft composition by keeping in mind elements like contrast, compositional placement, and size. Just because you don't have the subject in focus doesn't mean you can't cause people to concentrate on it as the subject.

In Figure 12–11,1 chose not to focus on anything in order to create a soft composition. The shapes in the composition are beautiful, the subject is recognizable even without detail, and the softness helps give a dream-like sense. I used color, contrast, and leading lines to reveal my subject as the focal point.

50mm, 1/125sec.,f/2.5,50

Figure 12–11:Soft compositions provide more feeling and less detail about a subject.

Back when I developed images in the darkroom, I would sometimes spend long periods of time waiting for images to fix and dry. One way that I used to pass some of the time was to create a pinhole camera from a box. A pinhole camera'is a simple light-proof camera that has no lens. A small hole serves as the aperture. These cameras are used mainly for fun and are based on the designs of the first cameras ever invented. Images created with a pinhole camera are soft in focus and have dark edges. These images are known as vignettes, and they serve mainly artistic and personal purposes and provide somewhat unpredictable results.

I don't make pinhole cameras anymore because I don't have a darkroom. However, I discovered that I could create a pinhole camera out of my digital camera, and I have been having fun with it ever since. To make a pinhole camera out of your digital camera, simply poke a tiny pinhole right in the center of the body cap to your digital SLR (the body cap is the piece that covers the camera body when you don't have a lens in place). You can keep a piece of tape over the hole whenever it isn't in use.

Now you can put your camera out just like the boxes I used to create. When you open the shutter, light from the pinhole exposes onto the digital sensor. With the convenience of digital photography, you can see your results instantly after the shot is complete rather than having to waitforthe images to develop.

In this part .

Composing a portrait is much different from composing a shot of a skyscraper or mountain. So, in this part of the book, I take you through the special considerations of shooting a range of common subjects. You find out about the complexities of photographing people and the unique concerns that arise when you're shooting in nature. I tell you about how to effectively compose still-life photos as well as photos of moving subjects, like trains or your kid playing soccer. And if artsy photos and composites are your thing, I show you how to create those, too. Finally, I delve into the subject of enhancing your compositions by using photo-editing software in postproduction.